Religious Groups Slow to Accept Government Money to Help the Poor

With the government stepping out of the welfare business, Congress turned to churches and other religious organizations to step in and apply for government money to start programs to help poor people make the transition from welfare to work.

But four years after Congress loosened the rules to make it easier for religious groups to apply for federal financing for social services, the initiative has gotten off to a slower start than many advocates have expected.

Many church leaders said they were reluctant or simply unprepared to submit to the rigorous guidelines required to become government contractors. Others said they were unaware of the initiative. And few states have become actively involved in the effort.

''Politicians or anyone else who thinks that there were thousands of faith-based organizations raring to go, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I don't see that,'' said Stanley W. Carlson-Thies, a senior fellow at the Center for Public Justice, a nonprofit Christian policy research group in Annapolis, Md., that has promoted church programs.

But in several states, including Indiana, that put a major effort into reaching out to churches, there is early evidence of increasing church-state collaboration. Indiana invited nearly 10,000 churches and religious groups to workshops to explain the process of applying for government money for social service programs.

While about 1,000 people attended the workshops, 75 groups applied for government money; of those, 43 were awarded a total of $3,422,000, said David Rolfes, project manager for FaithWorks Indiana, the state's outreach initiative to religious and charitable groups.

The biggest response has come from urban African-American churches, many of which have been serving the needy for years.

Among the first organizations to receive money in Indiana was Campbell Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church. As pastor of the small century-old church she grew up in, the Rev. Natalie R. Wimberly said she was wary when a member of her congregation proposed that the church apply for government aid to run a job training and education program.

Ms. Wimberly had visions of government officials meddling in Bible study groups, hiring decisions and bookkeeping. Church and state, she figured, were better kept apart.

''I was kind of suspicious about how much involvement the government would have in the life of the church,'' she said. ''Pleasingly, they have had very little, other than writing the check and forwarding the money.''

When Congress passed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, it included a provision known as charitable choice, which signaled a shift in the relationship between the government and religious groups.

Charitable choice allowed religious groups to receive government money for social programs without requiring them to censor their religious expression or give up their religious identity.

The money can be used for job search and job training programs, high school equivalency courses, English-as-a-second-language classes, nutrition and food-budgeting advice, drug-treatment and health clinics, maternity homes for unwed mothers and abstinence education.

Critics warned that it amounted to using tax dollars to pay for proselytizing, and partly because of concerns about violating the separation of church and state, states have been slow to adopt the program.

Both Gov. George W. Bush of Texas and Vice President Al Gore have said that if elected president, they would push to expand the approach.

A report released last month by the Center for Public Justice found that 37 states had not implemented charitable choice rules that require removing the restrictions on financing for religious groups.

Awarding grades for each state's performance, the center gave its only A-plus to Texas for aggressively promoting charitable choice and directing state agencies to appoint liaisons to religious groups. It gave A's to Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin; B's to Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Virginia; C's to Arkansas, California, Michigan and North Carolina; and F's to other states, except Alabama, which did not supply information.

Texas is also the only state where a program financed under charitable choice has been accused of crossing the line into religious indoctrination, said Marc D. Stern, a lawyer for the American Jewish Congress, which promotes separation of church and state.

In a lawsuit, the Congress and the Texas Civil Rights Project have accused the Jobs Partnership of Washington County, Tex., which received $8,000 from the State of Texas, of buying Bibles for students, requiring them to study Scripture and teaching them, in its own words, ''to find employment through a relationship with Jesus Christ.''

The lawsuit, set for trial next year in Federal District Court in Austin, Tex., claimed that a third of the program's students said on evaluation forms that they had been pressured to join a church or change their beliefs.

No national studies have assessed the effectiveness of religious programs paid for through charitable choice or how much money the states have channeled to religious groups. But visits to church-based programs in Indiana revealed a wide disparity in the professionalism, curriculum and religious emphasis of church programs that have been awarded government contracts.

In a tiny room in the basement of Campbell Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Patrick C. Bryant stood at a blackboard dividing one fraction into another, while his teacher and six other students in his class urged him on.

''Lord have mercy, I'm stuck, stuck like Chuck,'' Mr. Bryant said. The students were single mothers, high school dropouts, two teenagers from a group home and a young woman first arrested at age 12 whose goal was to attend mortician school. None were members of Campbell Chapel.

On their way outside for a break, the students passed posters with the words ''pledge to the Bible'' and ''pledge to the Christian flag.''

Their teacher, Edith Robinson, said that an earlier class had included a student who had tried to convert his classmates to his form of Christian belief, and some of them were offended. ''I had to stop that,'' said Ms. Robinson, a former elementary school teacher. ''I tell them they're here for one thing, and that's to get their G.E.D.''

Campbell Chapel's program, like many others, is headed not by the minister but by a church member. At Campbell Chapel, that person is Steven Bonds, a social worker whose great-grandfather helped found Campbell Chapel in 1901. The church has 50 members, most of whom do not live in the neighborhood.

''We were a church open two days a week,'' Mr. Bonds said, ''and now we are open seven days a week, serving the public.''

Upstairs, near the church's sanctuary, three students worked on computers. One student, Ali Banane, practiced on an Excel spreadsheet. The church program had already helped him get his high school equivalency and referred him to a restaurant job. Mr. Banane, an immigrant from Morocco, said he had become friendly and talked about religion with the church pastor and with Mr. Bonds, who once invited him to Sunday services.

''I told them I can't because I am a Muslim,'' he said, adding they had never pressured him. ''They don't want you to do something you don't want to do.'' Mr. Banane said he had been so comfortable at the church that he had referred three other Muslims there for classes.

Campbell Chapel has received a contract for $127,500 from the State of Indiana. Such contracts are not grants, and the money is paid in increments as clients fulfill certain requirements. Religious groups received payments each time a student completed a course, passed the G.E.D., was placed in a job and stayed on the job for six months.

In Indiana, religious groups have been prodded by state leaders to apply for money.

The governor, Frank L. O'Bannon, a Democrat, and the mayor of Indianapolis, Stephen Goldsmith, a Republican, made financing programs with religious organizations a priority when the initiative began. (Mr. Goldsmith is now a domestic policy adviser to Mr. Bush.)

Governor O'Bannon's effort, FaithWorks Indiana, hired an accounting and consulting firm, Crowe, Chizek & Company, to hold the workshops to explain how to apply for and manage government contracts. Religious leaders attending the workshops asked telling questions, said Mr. Rolfes, who runs the program.

He said among the questions asked were: Could religion be a criterion in hiring staff members? (the answer is yes); Could the money be used to buy adjoining property? (no); and Could they pray with the clients (yes, but only if it is not mandatory).

Monitoring how religion is invoked in a faith-based program will be hard, religious leaders said.

At Metro Church here, for example, students in the job skills program are matched with mentors from the church, who may invite them to services or Bible studies. Churches in many states are using this approach in programs, leaving mentors to judge how assertive to be about their religion.

''I'm not proselytizing,'' said Lynda Kosh, executive director of Metro Church's Reach Out and Restore Community Development Center, ''but, yes, I'd like them to get hooked into a church, and I don't care whether it's Metro Church or another one. What's important is that the church, any church, is a safety net, because these are clients whose families don't provide that safety net.''

At Faith Teaching Church of Deliverance, housed in a dilapidated building here, Bishop Shedrick Madison and his wife, Brenda, received a $24,100 government contract to run a summer program for children.

The church has taken in children for years, Mrs. Madison said, many of whom come from homes crippled by drug addiction and neglect. As they do ever year, the Madisons last summer provided food, video games, boxing, basketball and Bible studies. They also took the children to a tent revival.

In her office recently, Mrs. Madison said although the money was welcomed, she was disappointed that it took so long to receive payment for last summer's program.

''To me, it's a lot of red tape,'' she said. ''You got to report all these things, keep files. They want attendance records, they want assessment of kids, they want the kids' Social Security numbers.'' She went on: ''I talk to other churches who want to do grants like we got, and when I describe it, they say, 'I don't want to get involved with all that.' ''